Special Report

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Enterprise software giant SAP is investing $40m in Virtustream to help boost the cloud provider's ability to develop and deliver SAP products as a service.

SAP and Virtustream, which sells cloud management software, infrastructure as a service and managed services, have an established relationship that the series D investment is designed to consolidate.

Having already offered a number of SAP products as services, in May Virtustream became the first company to offer SAP's HANA in the cloud, enabling customers to deploy the in-memory computing technology rapidly for production as well as test and development environments.

In 2010, Virtustream was one of an initial group of cloud providers certified by SAP to deliver its applications. The cloud specialist now offers the full range of SAP software, including customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and supply chain applications.

Virtustream said it would use the investment to expand its infrastructure-as-a-service capacity and speed up the development of its xStream cloud management software and global service provider network.

SAP executive vice president Bjoern Goerke said in a statement: "Virtustream has been very successful in innovating a technology platform uniquely equipped for running mission-critical enterprise applications, such as ours, with the simplicity of the cloud."